RNC RACE CONTINUES…we received some great endorsements and press as momentum grows towards the Jan. 28-30 winter meeting of the RNC where the Chairman will be elected. I’m emerging as one of the leading challengers to the status quo. Anything can happen and many from the “outside” are trying to influence the process…I’ll keep you informed as we move along.

STATE CONVENTION…preparations for the state convention are on their way where we will elect a new State Chairman and the rest of our leadership team as we prepare for 2010. We have a unique opportunity to take back the Governor’s seat, protect our State Senate Majority, take back the House, and elect a new Secretary of State and Attorney General. It’s going to be a great 2 years to be part of the process!

America’s Big Three automakers got pounded on Capitol Hill last month. Senators from both parties took turns ridiculing General Motors, Ford and Chrysler as out-of-touch fossils, churning out poor-quality products that virtually no one wants to buy.

Wouldn’t it be nice if America’s automakers actually made cars that customers wanted? New hybrids, for example, and electric vehicles, midsize cars that rank high in quality and more models that get 30 miles per gallon?

Actually, that’s exactly what Detroit is doing. Not in a couple of years, not next year, but now.

The agony of U.S. automakers is familiar to people of a certain age in Britain. The British auto industry once employed thousands of people, before it lost its way.

Now some people point to Britain as an example of how to retool the auto industry in the United States.

The city of Coventry in central England was once known as the British Detroit. In the 1970s, the huge Ryton car plant on the city’s edge employed some 30,000 workers. Nearly two-thirds of Coventry’s entire population was employed in the auto industry.

The number of young Michigan children living in poverty has reached nearly one in four, and cases of neglect are on the rise, according to a study released today.

The 2008 Kids Count study, a look at child welfare, noted that the number of poor children younger than 4 rose from 16.8% to 22.9% in seven years, and neglect cases — the lack of housing, food, clothing or proper supervision — rose from about 8,700 in 2003 to nearly 11,000 in 2007.

“The last thing we want is more and more children coming into our child welfare system and that is exactly what’s happening now,” said Jane Zehnder-Merrell, study director and researcher at the Michigan League for Human Services.

President-elect Barack Obama said Americans will have to sacrifice to lift the nation from recession and acknowledged that some of his campaign promises may not be fulfilled because of what he described as a dire economic situation.

In a wide-ranging interview on ABC’s “This Week” that aired Sunday, Mr. Obama continued to sell his proposed economic stimulus package as “bold” and insisted Congress must pass it by mid-February.

“Everybody is going to have to give. Everybody is going to have to have some skin in the game,” Mr. Obama said about the package during the interview, taped Saturday in Washington.

Until last week, Carol M. Browner, President-elect Barack Obama’s pick as global warming czar, was listed as one of 14 leaders of a socialist group’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society, which calls for “global governance” and says rich countries must shrink their economies to address climate change.

By Thursday, Mrs. Browner’s name and biography had been removed from Socialist International’s Web page, though a photo of her speaking June 30 to the group’s congress in Greece was still available.

Socialist International, an umbrella group for many of the world’s social democratic political parties such as Britain’s Labor Party, says it supports socialism and is harshly critical of U.S. policies.

SAN DIEGO — The controversy over Roland Burris wound up teaching us a thing or two about President-elect Barack Obama.

First, the bad news: Obama made a serious blunder when he followed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his No. 2, Dick Durbin, out on a limb in opposing Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s attempt to fill Obama’s former Senate seat. Reid spoke too soon, and took too rigid a stance in asserting the Senate’s power to decide who gets seated. That power is limited by the Constitution and previous Supreme Court decisions, and Reid should have known this.

As a former professor of constitutional law, Obama should have known this too. Besides, having resigned from the Senate, Obama should have kept his attention on transition matters and remained above the fray. He certainly didn’t have to join in the circus of Illinois politics, and it made little sense for him to do so after trying so hard to distance himself and his staff from the Blagojevich scandal. If Obama was determined to get involved, he might have done himself some good by stepping in to negotiate a settlement between Burris and the Senate leadership. Who better to do that than the leader of the Democratic Party? Instead, for whatever reason, the president-elect threw Burris under the bus.

As the new U.S. administration prepares to take office amid grave financial and international crises, it may seem counterintuitive to argue that the very unsettled nature of the international system generates a unique opportunity for creative diplomacy.

That opportunity involves a seeming contradiction. On one level, the financial collapse represents a major blow to the standing of the United States. While American political judgments have often proved controversial, the American prescription for a world financial order has generally been unchallenged. Now disillusionment with the United States’ management of it is widespread.

At the same time, the magnitude of the debacle makes it impossible for the rest of the world to shelter any longer behind American predominance or American failings.